


a history of revolution

by ghost_lingering



Category: Capital Scandal
Genre: Character of Color, Dark Agenda Challenge, F/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 17:48:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_lingering/pseuds/ghost_lingering
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Na Yeo Kyeong's first love was Korea; she has always wanted Korea to be free.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a history of revolution

**Author's Note:**

  * For [veracious](https://archiveofourown.org/users/veracious/gifts).



> Hahaha, man, the Yuletide panic runs strongly in this one. I lost count of the number of times I went back to change something in the first _hour_ after posting; this switch to AO3 &amp; having total control over our own stories is dangerous, man. *g* Veracious, I hope you like it! I remember seeing your unfilled request after last year's exchange and thinking: "That would be really cool to do a NYR for ..." Obviously I totally failed on the NYR front, but I'm glad I got an opportunity to write it this year! Thanks to P. for beta-duty. Please see end note for a brief warning about historical perspectives and my possible missteps. Any factual, cultural, historical, etc mistakes are, of course, my own.

The first thing Woo Wan learns is that Yeo Kyeong is strangely unself-conscious when they have sex. Forthright. She is forthright, and it is then he realizes, truly, that once she makes up her mind about something she doesn't second guess.

The first thing Yeo Kyeong learns is that Woo Wan is hesitant when they have sex. He hesitates before choosing a course of action and it is only slowly that she realizes he is trying, carefully, not to startle her, as if she is a skittish colt who will bolt at loud noises. He is trying, she realizes, to be a gentlemen. She disabuses him of his need for hesitation. But being a gentleman—that part, at least, she likes.

Their first years are hard—they are on the run using what money Woo Wan's father smuggles to them, what meager savings Yeo Kyeong has managed to accrue.

His face is well known, but hers—hers is easier to hide. At least among his world. At least once a few years have passed. They lost more than a marksman with Cha Song Joo—they lost a source of information. Who else would be able to bend the ear of law makers and businessmen and have no suspicions attached to them for it, who else but a whore? The truth, they find, is ears do not need to be bent for mouths to flap, indiscriminately. Woo Wan reacts strongly to the suggestion that his wife go undercover, but she is a true Chousan woman and it is the way of their love that when he's an idiot she ignores him; she gets jobs cleaning the houses of rich Japanese businessmen and law makers, and while she dusts, she listens.

She gets pregnant, once. She faints near the end of it, blood running down her legs, and when she wakes it is with Woo Wan next to her and holding her hand and not crying. They never talk of it, but is weeks before they touch again; she starts it. Somewhere in her heart she is weary that she had to reach to him. It is only shortly thereafter that they find an orphan boy who needs a place to stay; they take him in. Then a girl. And then another boy and then too many for Woo Wan to feed and wash and teach by himself as Yeo Kyeong spies. She quits her jobs. She no longer works to support the family; she worries she is also no longer working to free Korea. Woo Wan is relieved for all of a day until he realizes that they will still have to get money, somewhere. He begins writing for Kim Tak Goo again, propaganda this time, manifestos of freedom.

They are too conspicuous to live in Seoul, with all their transient children, so they stay in a nearby village. Woo Wan's father still sends them information and money, and, for the resistance, they become in charge of supplies, of medical care, of training, of education. Soo Hyeon is, unsurprisingly, simply in charge.

Resistance work isn't like in the stories. It isn't glamourous. They learn quickly that the mistakes they make, the gaps in information, get people killed. Three men are beaten to death by the Japanese police. A woman gets raped and shot, her hair ripped from her skull when someone grabbed her to muffle her cries for help. For all the people they save, all the Japanese officials Soo Hyeon and Woo Wan shoot down, three more rise up in their place. It is like treading water in a sea of jellyfish.

And then, in 1941, war comes. It always does.

Yeo Kyeong rises before the sun, and she is already in the kitchen when Woo Wan wakes. She wears a faded hanbok of earth tones; her only concession to her youth is the tight pull of her tied up hair. Time has gentled her. She is stern, but bends more easily now. Time has settled him—no, she has. His whimsy is kinder now.

"I do not like that we are taking orders from China," she says, as he takes his place beside her and drinks his tea, "Why are we not following our own orders?"

"Because we are part of a coalition," he says, looking to the north. Soo Hyeon left months ago, and is working to build up the Liberation Army, but there has been no word directly. Yeo Kyeong covers his hand with hers. "We will defeat Japan and finally be free," he says, but then their youngest charge wakes up crying and there is no more time to speak of politics.

When the war ends it is not how they dreamed; Soo Hyeon comes home to tell of Japanese soldiers pushing Korean ones out of Seoul after the Japanese surrender, simply because they were not American, because there were not a nationality or race worthy of respect. Yeo Kyeong stiffens; she need not look to know Woo Wan does the same beside her.

After the war, after the Japanese, it is the Soviets, and then the Americans and the Soviets. Korea is still divided. Korea is still not free.

Soo Hyeon brings drafts of the constitution that is being written. Woo Wan writes serious comments in the margins, but when he and Soo Hyeon pause to discuss aloud, Yeo Kyeong is charmed by how they speak of government as they might have when they were children.

"Ahh, why does America hate socialism?" Woo Wan asks in one instance, as Soo Hyeon tries to awkwardly soothe a crying child climbing on his legs. Woo Wan picks it up with a casual sort of affection, borne of living with children for many years. The crying subsides.

"Because America is capitalist," Soo Hyeon says, giving a half-smile, sounding as if he is reciting a line from one of Kim Tak Goo's publications. The children who pass through the house have begun to know Soo Hyeon as an uncle, a serious man who gives them gifts of sweets and tells them about great cities far, far away. They know Woo Wan as the man who tells them ghost stories before bed and lets them perch on his shoulders. They know Yeo Kyeong as the woman who kisses their cheeks when they are hurt, who disciples them when they misbehave.

"Capitalism promotes a material culture," Yeo Kyeong says absently, walking into the room. "It's time for this one to go to bed now," she continues, as she takes the child from Woo Wan's arms. There is a murmur of protest, but it is token only: the child is most of the way asleep already.

There are less of them now, the children: a Christian convent has taken many in, to teach them, to feed them, to tell them of the Lord. Yeo Kyeong is friendly with the nuns, but will not convert.

When war breaks out again it is called a civil war, but she knows in her inner heart that it is not entirely the case: Korea becomes a stage for the US to fight the USSR, Korea becomes a stage for Capitalism to fight Communism. Korea becomes a stage for self-slaughter. Soo Hyeon fights on the front lines; in this war, Woo Wan fights beside him. Yeo Kyeong lives by herself. She watches as her country turns becomes a war zone, with bombs and guns and foreign soldiers who look for solace in anything they can find.

One finds Yeo Kyeong as she is walking home. She remembers a warehouse and a promise not to untie her hanbok until Korea was free. She remembers Japanese men taking comfort in Korean women's bodies. She remembers, not two weeks ago, a woman coming to the orphanage with bruises on her arms and an infection inflicted on her by American men. She remembers Cha Song Joo. But the man does not touch her; instead he asks, in broken Korean, for directions. She gives them, grateful it is all he asked for, grateful there was nothing he took she wasn't glad to give.

Woo Wan comes back with a bad leg and news of another death they do not talk about. The land, their land, is washed in white; washed in death and the men who bring it. The next year, when Yeo Kyeong dons white for Soo Hyeon's _sosang_ there is a group of American soldiers who pass, confused as to the meaning of her attire. Woo Wan explains to her that in America white is a color of purity. To Yeo Kyeong it seems like theirs is a backwards sort of understanding. When those soldiers leave Korea, they will leave a country with unchanged borders and hundreds of thousands slaughtered. They will leave what was, for them, an interlude.

One day Yeo Kyeong wakes up, Woo Wan's arm slung over her waist, snoring into her shoulder and she finds she is older now. Woo Wan's father is dead, his step-mother remarried, and she has lived through—five?—six?—governments. She gets up, and sits by the window, an odd queasiness in her stomach. _How much closer is freedom now?_ she thinks. There is a baby at the orphanage, a girl, Park Song Joo. When Yeo Kyeong held her she grasped at the fabric of Yeo Kyeong's hanbok and would not let go. Yeo Kyeong worries the girl will grow in uncertain times.

Woo Wan comes to sit beside her, takes her hand, and leans to kiss her. "Come back to bed," he says, and she looks over at him and frowns.

"You are being lazy," she replies, and he gives a slow and easy smile.

"Me? Lazy?" he asks, laughing, as she drags him to his feet and the beginning of the day.

Freedom is not an end point; the revolution changes, she thinks, but is never truly over.

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: this story, which is in part about the history of Korea from the 1930s to the 1960s, was written by someone (me!) who mostly knows history from a US/Western perspective. While I did my best forget the biases I was taught and to relearn (or just flat out learn) the history of Korea, WWII, and the Korean War, I can't promise that there aren't missteps or places where my white, western POV shows through, in terms of culture, history, or something else.
> 
> Hopefully I didn't make any horrible mistakes, but there's always the fear that there's something I didn't know that I didn't know, so.


End file.
